Adia Wahid
Adia Wahid is an artist living in London whose works have been described as diagrams doubled over diagrams. This doubling is reflected in the mediumistic hybridity of her works, combining drawing, painting, and printing in the processes and products of her practice. She is absorbed within discrete histories and coding systems such as carpet and textile weaving, writing tablets, mathematical syntax, computing, and painting.
Adia Wahid’s practice is centred on drawing, with tools often repurposed across different forms of making. This use, misuse, and reuse of tools and motifs (such as the grid) recognises that things have a life of their own, an ecology — even an economy — in and of making. A sketch on a post-it note or graph paper may, for Wahid, seed a painting years later, while images migrate freely between paint and print, each informing the other. These layered process traditions navigate the space between the automated world we inhabit and the body we occupy, recording a presence — the work functioning like a diagram folded over other diagrams, splicing time and cultural syntax together while leaving deliberate gaps.
Originally an economist, Wahid has lived in the US, Singapore, and South Korea, and all of these experiences fuse together in and inform her art. She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, following a BFA from the Chelsea College of Arts and Design.